Something about 'prances, O!' on her horse, you know, or you're a hem'd fool if you don't. I never could sing; wish I could! It's the joy of life! It's utterance! Hey for harmony!"
"Eh! brayvo! now you're a man, Steeve! and welcomer and welcomest; yi— yi, O!" jolly Butcher Billing sang out sharp. "Life wants watering. Here's a health to Robert Eccles, wheresoever and whatsoever! and ne'er a man shall say of me I didn't stick by a friend like Bob. Cheers, my lads!"
Robert's health was drunk in a thunder, and praises of the purity of the brandy followed the grand roar. Mrs. Boulby received her compliments on that head.
"'Pends upon the tide, Missis, don't it?" one remarked with a grin broad enough to make the slyness written on it easy reading.
"Ah! first a flow and then a ebb," said another.
"It's many a keg I plant i' the mud,
Coastguardsman, come! and I'll have your blood!"
Instigation cried, "Cut along;" but the defiant smuggler was deficient in memory, and like Steeve Bilton, was reduced to scatter his concluding rhymes in prose, as "something about;" whereat jolly Butcher Billing, a reader of song-books from a literary delight in their contents, scraped his head, and then, as if he had touched a spring, carolled,—
"In spite of all you Gov'ment pack,
I'll land my kegs of the good Cognyac"—
"though," he took occasion to observe when the chorus and a sort of cracker of irrelevant rhymes had ceased to explode; "I'm for none of them games. Honesty!—there's the sugar o' my grog."
"Ay, but you like to be cock-sure of the stuff you drink, if e'er a man did," said the boatbuilder, whose eye blazed yellow in this frothing season of song and fun.